Sex seems to have been momentarily eclipsed as a topic for French literature, giving way to something sexier: trauma. Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq, two authors who until now have shared a publisher (P.O.L.), began exchanging blows last month in the literary pages of all the major papers over Darrieussecq's latest novel, Tom est mort, a first-person narrative of a mother's attempt to come to terms with the death of her small child ten years earlier. In 1995 Laurens had published Philippe, an autobiographical work about the death of her infant son the previous year. Darrieussecq has not lost a child. Laurens suspects both Darrieussecq and their common editor of having hidden Tom est mort from her; she first read it as a member of a prize jury. Laurens feels that Darrieussecq has committed an act of 'psychological plagiarism'. Reading the novel, she writes, made her feel as though it had been written in her own bedroom, as though Darrieussecq were an uninvited guest, a squatter in her psyche. She has, in other words, stolen Laurens's trauma.

LRB 20 September 2007 | PDF Download